Ketchup-ing

Things that happened while I was off the edge of the Interwebs:

• Cormac McCarthy (my office neighbor while I was at the Santa Fe Institute) won the Pulitzer for fiction for his novel The Road. Cormac is also (amazingly!) giving an interview on Oprah, which is almost as amazing as Pynchon appearing on the Simpsons.
• A new branch campus for the University of Washington is moving forward. This is a compromise over a previous attempt by the city of Everett to establish an independent polytechnic, which they hypothetically called the “Washington Institute of Technology” (WIT…you have to have a sense of humor to teach there?) This will bring to four the number of posts I have under the category of WIT.
• Quantum inteference in photosynthesis
• Earth-like planet discovered only twenty light years away. (Probably) five times the size of as massive as the Earth. If we send off an expedition today, by the time we arrive we should have been able to evolve to survive in the five times higher gravity?
• Papers scirate wants me to read while I was away: 0704.3432, 0704.2529, 0704.2575, 0704.2575, 0704.2241, and 0704.3142.
• A horrible title for a Nature blurb, “Quantum cryptography is hacked,” about an experiment performed at MIT (Phys. Rev. A, 75, 042327.) Notice how an inacurate title leads to all sorts of bad follow ups. That’s almost egregious enough to induce a Rage Against Doofosity!